Inventory Management

The advent of "omni-shopping" has put additional pressures on the merchandise planning department, and fundamentally broken the traditional relationship between sales and inventory or receipt plans. Our friends at RSR Research recently published a new report "Retail Supply Chain Execution 2016: Dancing in the Dark" which notes the new plight of the planner, and goes into some fact based findings on the overall need for improved inventory management, including solving the age old problem of getting accurate perpetual inventory positions.

Inventory is the largest, short term discretionary investment that a Retailer makes in terms of "capital investment" in the business. For years now a focus on improving inventory turns has driven quite a few merchandising organizations particularly during economic times when cash (potentially with higher borrowing costs) was the most precious commodity and squeezing inventory investment through a variety of actions helped produce increased cash flow.